I n many countries, including the UK, books enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author. This means that as of January 1st, 2025, the work of any author who died in 1954 or before is, in principle, now freely available. In the US, however, the rules are slightly different. While any work published since 1978 will follow the same rule as other countries, previously copyright lasted for 95 years from publication date. This means all books published before 1930 are in the public domain, regardless of when the author died. Below, some of the books recommended on Five Books that are in the public domain internationally:
Classic American Literature
“The book showcases both the allure and the ricketiness of the American dream. The story shows the American dream is fragile despite its potency and persistence. It shows its perpetual obsolescence. We often hear that it’s harder to rise from the bottom to the top in the US than it is in many other countries. Even in Fitzgerald’s day, the fluidity of society was fading. Perhaps The Great Gatsby still seems germane because of the way it showed the mismatch between American actualities and American ideals, the two-faced character of the American dream, its materialism and idealism.” Read more...
The Great American Novel
Lawrence Buell ,
“The Scarlet Letter is a tragic love story, but it’s also a story about resistance and transformation…Hester is a visionary. In the final chapter, she articulates her “firm belief” that at some future time, when the world has grown ripe for it, “a new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness”. It struck me that this might be that time.” Read more...
The best books on Gender and Human Nature
Carol Gilligan ,
Philosopher
“I thought about responding to your call for a list of the top 5 American novels with ‘1) Moby-Dick 2) Moby-Dick 3) Moby-Dick’ —an obsessive answer that would be true to the spirit of this monomaniacal book! I won’t go full Ahab and claim that it is THE great American novel, but I will confess it is my favorite. There’s something about its dizzying mix of high and low, Herman Melville’s exuberant love of language, and the novel’s remarkable capaciousness (everything reminds me of Moby-Dick !) that makes me love to read it, reread it, teach it, joke about it, tweet about it, reference it at the slightest provocation.” Read more...
The Best 19th-Century American Novels
Nathan Wolff ,
Literary Scholar
“I chose the book largely because I think Mark Twain…is a major innovator: he expanded our sense of what the nineteenth-century U.S. novel could do, all while dramatizing how slavery’s legacy persisted into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—and on into the present day. Almost everything beautiful and troubling about this novel comes back to Twain’s complex decision to focalize a tale of shocking brutality through the perspective of a child.” Read more...
The Best 19th-Century American Novels
Nathan Wolff ,
Literary Scholar
“This book is about a family of four American sisters, living in genteel poverty during the American Civil War…..The March sisters have grown up together and I think it’s interesting when you see the tension between the fact that they have a shared upbringing and shared values, and yet they are such obviously different personalities that they can have disagreements. They don’t just agree about everything, and they’re forceful and vocal in their disagreement, but the book is still built upon the strength of the bond between them. I find that interesting, that you can have conflict and love and support all wrapped up in that relationship, and I think it’s really a tender look at the dynamic between the four of them..” Read more...
The Best Coming-of-Age Novels About Sisters
Laura Wood ,
Children's Author
Classic English Literature
“I started off with a sense of Sense and Sensibility as a rather stereotypical novel – very much like a lot of 18th century novels that I’ve read. There is a good sister and a bad sister, and the bad sister gets reformed and everybody lives happily ever after. But as I kept rereading it, I started to realise that it is actually a very dark novel, probably the darkest of Jane Austen’s novels.” Read more...
The Best Jane Austen Books
Patricia Meyer Spacks ,
Literary Scholar
“It is one of the most perfect novels ever written.It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.” Read more...
The Best Charles Dickens Books
Jenny Hartley ,
Biographer
“Not only is Eliot a great moral thinker—you feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes of Middlemarch—but it’s also about the use of literature in moving us morally forward…It’s not only my favourite philosophical novel, it’s my favourite novel. I teach it again and again and each time I am flabbergasted by what she’s able to accomplish and what my students get out of it.” Read more...
The Best Philosophical Novels
Rebecca Goldstein ,
Philosopher
“English was not Conrad’s first language but he wrote better in English than almost any of us can. I sense that the way he’s written this is very much in sympathy of an artificial colonial administrative structure that is foisted on another culture and then what horrors unfold as a consequence.” Read more...
The best books on Displacement
Michelle Jana Chan ,
Novelist
“In the 271 years since its publication, it has not aged, nor been surpassed. It is the easiest read in the world, the perfect boy-meets-girl story, a romcom-come-social satire set in Hanoverian England, Hogarth set to words. No wonder it has been turned into numerous films and formed the basis of no less than three different operas….This is one of the very few books I have ever read that is literally unputdownable. I stopped reading occasionally to eat and sleep, but that was all.” Read more...
The Best Long Novels
Five Books ,
Classic Crime Novels
“Most people when you ask them what the best Sherlock Holmes story is will say The Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s one of the four novels featuring Holmes. Probably the best novel in my mind that he wrote, and probably the most atmospheric: the moor in Dartmoor with a convict prison nearby, and with very few potential suspects. I understand that Doyle went there on holiday and had a friend who told him the local lore about a hound from hell. The only downside to the novel is that there were so few people living there that the suspect pool was very limited.” Read more...
The Best Mystery Books
David Baldacci ,
Novelist
“It’s credited with being the beginning of the whole genre of suspense. That’s why I picked it. I’ve only read it twice, but it’s lingered in my consciousness: the images and the feel of it. He really is a master of the tricks. I read somewhere that there are 40 cliff-hangers in it—he sort of invented the cliff-hanger. And I like the Russian doll structure of all the different accounts. You gradually lift off each little doll’s body and find another plot strand and another secret. I love that. It’s very cleverly done.” Read more...
The Best Classic Thrillers
Lucy Atkins ,
Novelist
“It’s a beautifully made book—well-bound with lovely paper. The editorial choices are smart. And in one volume you get most of what Poe wrote: all the poetry, all the stories, his sole novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and much of his criticism and essays. Which is great, because readers can dip in wherever they like, and watch as Poe takes an idea and works it through different genres, shifting from, say, gothic romance to satire to speculative fiction. The book captures the restlessness of his invention.” Read more...
The Best Edgar Allan Poe Books
Shawn Rosenheim ,
Literary Scholar
The Man in the Queue is the first book by Josephine Tey featuring Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. It opens with a queue to see a popular play at a London theatre, a world which Elizabeth Mackintosh (Tey's real name) knew well. A part of the action also takes place in the Scottish Highlands, in a fictional village on a loch by the sea on the west coast. Born in Inverness, it's another location the author was familiar with and the settings in the book are wonderful. The plot is satisfying (better than some recent bestsellers), though as Tey's first foray into detective fiction, a little formulaic.
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Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy
“The book has just enough science that it seems real. If you read it as a kid and re-read it as a geologist, you think there are some very interesting things in there.
He plays around with certain facts. He comes up with a very interesting theory to explain that it doesn’t get hot as you go deeper underground (which was in vogue at the time), but the book imagines the preservation of prehistoric life in the subsurface and that’s something we’re still looking at. Many of the organisms that we find down there today look to be, from an evolutionary point of view, extremely primitive. The conditions we find them in are very much what the surface of the Earth used to look like, three billion years ago. There is no oxygen and three billion years ago there was very little oxygen on the surface of our planet.” Read more...
The best books on Life Below the Surface of the Earth
Tullis Onstott ,
Environmentalist
“It is not just a science fiction novel, it is part of the ‘invasion’ genre. It is one of thousands of invasion novels that were written from the 1870s onwards, which nearly always featured an anxiety about invasion from the European continent…What Wells does is take that idea of invasion fantasy but give it an astronomical scale. He turns it into what we would understand as a science fictional invasion. In terms of science, Wells was also picking up on various phenomena like a contemporary obsession with Mars.” Read more...
The Best H G Wells Books
Roger Luckhurst ,
Literary Scholar
“It wasn’t published till 1830, but she had the idea and wrote the story when she was nineteen years old, 200 years ago, in 1816…Frankenstein has a reach of imagination that is almost hysterical. She was able to pluck this idea both from her imagination and her understanding of science. She understood what Erasmus Darwin—Charles Darwin’s grandfather—was doing: experiments with electricity and the re-animation of dead objects. She was fantastically well-read, she was terribly intellectual, she was a political radical. She had no truck with modesty and restraint, or doing what was expected of her. She was going to let her imagination go as far as it possibly could. Then she defended it.” Read more...
The Best Gothic Novels
Sarah Perry ,
Novelist
“It’s incredibly high romantic fantasy, and it’s very strange. We’ve got people in pixie land and goblin land. We have people who are fundamentally extremely good, and then we have the enemy who are deeply unpleasant bad people, and we end with the good guys winning. But rather as Blake said of Milton, you get the feeling that Eddison is much more interested in what’s going on in the enemy court – the machinations! It’s historically accurate, as far as you can say that for a secondary world fantasy novel. There are political machinations: people will stab each other in the back, there’s an attractive young woman who is clearly sleeping around to get power and influence… And he’s really enjoying writing that – much more than he’s enjoying writing about the good king and his two brothers, who are these upstanding, noble, jolly good chaps you can imagine on the playing fields of Eton.” Read more...
The Best Grimdark Fantasy
Anna Smith Spark ,
Novelist
“One of the aims of my little book On Conan Doyle is to urge people to explore Conan Doyle’s many wonderful non-Sherlockian works. Certainly the one that most people should start with is The Lost World . It introduces Professor George Edward Challenger, a self-important but wonderfully funny and committed scientist who discovers a plateau in a South American jungle where dinosaurs still roam the earth. This is based on some actual historical explorations that were going on at the time. The novel obviously inspired Jurassic Park . It is one of the great classic versions of a lost civilisation.” Read more...
The Best Sherlock Holmes Books
Michael Dirda ,
Journalist
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